generation effect

as in: generating words from word fragments instead of merely remembering them

necessarily cognitivist idea

multiple studies bring this up as a point for flipped classroom, where students generate their own explanations, their own quizzes, etc

appears similar to the testing effect

brought up in 2014 📖 The Glass Cage:

• > Since the late 1970s, cognitive psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the generation effect. It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they read them from a page.
  • this very much muddies the waters and blurs the line to active recall

brought up in 📰 Here Is Why Most Spaced Repetition Apps Dont Work and How To Fix It:

• (Slamecka & Graf, 1978) – active production of a given piece of information increases your chances of permanently storing it in your long-term memory.

see also: language generation

another curious take that seems relevant:

• > Forrester didn’t have the only business simulation game in town. Some people, in fact, used business simulation games to teach management. Forrester took pains to distinguish his approach. While “they superficially appear very similar . . . educationally they move in the opposite direction.”62 At stake were radically different conceptions of agency and learning. Playing a simulated world entailed superficial learning, while building such a world entailed deep understanding. — 📖 Building SimCity — How to Put the World in a Machine